Jesus bloodline

The Jesus bloodline (not to be confused with the genealogy of Jesus or the Desposyni) is a modern thesis which asserts that the historical Jesus had at least one natural child with Mary Magdalene.

The thesis was first postulated by Donovan Joyce in his 1973 book The Jesus Scroll, then by Andreas Faber-Kaiser in his 1977 book Jesus died in Kashmir, where he interviewed Basharat Saleem, who claimed to be a descendant of Jesus.

The Jesus bloodline thesis was popularized by the 1982 controversial non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, in which the authors argued:

The symbolic significance of Jesus is that he is God exposed to the spectrum of human experience - exposed to the first-hand knowledge of what being a man entails. But could God, incarnate as Jesus, truly claim to be a man, to encompass the spectrum of human experience, without coming to know two of the most basic, most elemental facets of the human condition? Could God claim to know the totality of human existence without confronting two such essential aspects of humanity as sexuality and paternity? We do not think so. In fact, we do not not think the Incarnation truly symbolises what it is intended to symbolise unless Jesus were married and sired children. The Jesus of the Gospels, and of established Christianity, is ultimately incomplete - a God whose incarnation as man is only partial. The Jesus who emerged from our research enjoys, in our opinion, a much more valid claim to what Christianity would have him be.

Margaret Starbird later developed the thesis that Saint Sarah was the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and that this was the source of the legend associated with the cult at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. She also claimed that the name "Sarah" meant "Princess" in Hebrew, thus making her the forgotten child of the "sang raal", the blood royal of the King of the Jews.

The authors of the 2000 book Rex Deus: The True Mystery of Rennes-Le-Chateau; and later the 2003 conspiracy fiction novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, accepted both of the above theses as being valid. The 1996 book Bloodline of the Holy Grail by Laurence Gardner is unique in that it presents dubious pedigree charts of Jesus as ancestor of all the royal families of European history.

Elements of the thesis are propounded by the 2007 documentary film The Lost Tomb of Jesus by Simcha Jacobovici focusing on the Talpiot Tomb discovery, that was also published as a book entitled The Jesus Family Tomb.

Thesis

Although they have become intertwined in some accounts, there are two different versions of the Jesus bloodline thesis.

Merovingian dynasty

The main elements of the Merovingian version of the Jesus bloodline thesis are that:

• The historical Jesus was a descendant of both King David and High Priest Zadok of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah;
• The historical Jesus had a child or children with Mary Magdalene, with whom he was married;
• The child or children of the historical Jesus and Mary Magdalene were part of the Desposyni;
• The European descendants of these children became the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled the Franks from 457 to 751;
• The Roman Catholic Church has conspired to systematically suppress the truth about the historical Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their bloodline for 2000 years;
• The Church tried to kill off all remnants of this bloodline and their supposed guardians, the Cathars and the Knights Templar, in order to maintain power through the apostolic succession of Peter, instead of the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene;
• There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, regardless of whether it was created during the Middle Ages or modern times, which is manipulating political happenings from behind the scenes in their bid to install elite members of this bloodline on the thrones of Europe and Jerusalem.

Rex Deus dynasty

The main elements of the Rex Deus (Latin for "King God") version of the Jesus bloodline thesis are that:

• There is a bloodline descended from both King David and High Priest Zadok of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah;
• The bloodline consists of Israelite noble families who preserved their dual lineage intact;
• The bloodline includes the historical Jesus, Mary Magdalene, their children, and the Desposyni;
• Members of the bloodline have appointed themselves as the custodians of the mysteries of Judaism and Christianity;
• The bloodline avoided persecution by adopting the strategy of blending in with whatever culture and religion they happened to be in the presence of (compare with Taqiyya), while secretly passing on from generation to generation their true beliefs and rituals;
• The bloodline also survived culturally by disseminating certain ideas which became embedded within the psyche of the people of Europe. A notable example would be Arthurian legend and Grail lore.

Claimants

The following is a list of notable persons who have claimed to be of the Jesus bloodline:

• Basharat Saleem
• Michel Lafosse
• Kathleen McGowan
• Suzanne Olsson was once a tentative claimant. No. This is a lie. Suzanne Olsson has repeatedly clarified her position that nothing short of DNA can serve as solid proof.<

Religious adherence

No mainstream Christian denomination has adhered to the Jesus bloodline thesis as a doctrine or a source of religious devotion since they maintain that Jesus was perpetually celibate. However, several individuals and small groups within the New Age movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have adopted a dogmatic devotion to the hypothetical Jesus bloodline. They believe this bloodline will eventually breed a sacred king who will usher in a Messianic Age. Some of these adherents view the ceremony that celebrated the beginning of the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as a "holy wedding"; some view Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their alleged daughter, Sarah, as a "Second Holy Family"; while many focus on exalting the "sacred feminine", which they believe Mary Magdalene personifies.

Some fringe Christian eschatologists warn of the Antichrist and the False Prophet, prophesied by the author of the Book of Revelations, and their planned use of the false claim that they are both of the Jesus bloodline as propaganda having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of believers in such a way as to support the achievement of Satanic objectives.

Criticism

The Jesus bloodline thesis has parallels with other legends about the flight of disciples to distant lands, such as the one that Joseph of Arimathea traveled to England after the death of Jesus taking with him a piece of thorn from the Crown of Thorns, which he later planted in Glastonbury. Historians generally regard these legends as "pious fraud" produced during the Middle Ages.

The Jesus bloodline thesis from the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is not contained in any of the "Priory of Sion documents" and was dismissed as fiction by Pierre Plantard in 1982 on a French radio interview, as well as by Philippe de Cherisey in a magazine article. While the Desposyni (the family of Jesus) are well known to have existed; the notion of a direct bloodline from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and its supposed relationship to the Merovingians, is widely dismissed as pseudohistorical by an overwhelming majority of academic historians such as Darrell Bock and Bart Ehrman, as have journalists and investigators such as Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who has an extensive archive on this subject matter.

In 2005, UK TV presenter and amateur archaeologist Tony Robinson edited and narrated a detailed rebuttal of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, "The Real Da Vinci Code", shown on Channel 4. The programme featured lengthy interviews with many of the main protagonists and cast severe doubt on, among other related myths, the alleged landing of Mary Magdalene in France.

The speculation surrounding a Rex Deus bloodline is based upon dubious historical evidence that has been supposedly lost, therefore conveniently cannot be independently verified. The authors' informant who related this revisionist history is named "Michael", who claimed that the evidence was contained in his father's bureau. The account goes as follows:

Sadly, Michael's father died suddenly ... and by the time he returned to the family home he found that the bureau and all it contained had been appropriated by a brother. Bound by his oath of secrecy, he could never explain why he wanted it back and, despite the best efforts, he has not seen that piece of furniture nor its contents from that day to this and he has reason to believe that his brother sold the bureau, an antique of some value, blissfully unaware of its contents."

Robert Lockwood, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh’s director for communications, sees the thesis of Jesus having had children as a deliberate piece of anti-Catholic propaganda; he compares it with Reformation period allegations such as the sexual misbehavior of Popes (which did actually occur: see, for example, Pope Alexander VI) and sees it as part of a long tradition of anti-Catholic feeling with deep roots in the American Protestant imagination.

The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars involved in the quest for the historical Jesus from a liberal religious perspective, concluded that the notion that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene or some other woman (regardless of whether or not this union produced a child or children) is possible, and should not be viewed as "heretical", "blasphemous" or "anti-Christian". However, they argue that there is no historical evidence which conclusively supports or refutes such a notion.

Ultimately, the notion that a person living millennia ago has a small number of descendants living today is statistically improbable. Steve Olson, author of Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins, published an article in Nature demonstrating that, as a matter of statistical probability, "[i]f anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet." However, as the Y-chromosomal Aaron experiments have recently shown, many Europeans of Jewish ancestry do appear to have a shared paternal lineage, traditionally ascribed to the high priest Aaron, as a priest in the Jewish faith must fulfill this criterion.

External links

• Holy Bloodline, an article from the official site of the documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus